Game Night

Last night, I had a realization. I’ll explain. One that hit me like bricks.

My daughter is a teen and from what I hear, a pretty typical teen. She loves to stay in her room and chat with friends on her phone. But I also like spending time with her, so I try to find reasons for her to do things with me. One of those things was family game night. I’d periodically claim “Tonight is game night!” and let her pick out a game. We had a few that we liked to play including Balderdash and Exploding Kittens. Even better, Erika would often join in too. Here’s one night with Exploding Kittens:

It was often my responsibility to read the rules and explain them to everyone else. But, on this night, I might have cheated with that a little bit. When I was reading the rules, I noticed that there was the “Cone of Shame” clause. It says that if anyone loses track of whose turn it is and asks whose turn it is, they must wear the Cone of Shame that comes with the game. Well, I wasn’t totally unfair, I offered to let McKenna and Erika read the rules for themselves, but they both declined. I might have umm, forgotten to explain this rule. So after one of many distracting side conversations Erika wanted to get back to the game, she asked whose turn it is and excitedly, I invoked the Cone of Shame rule and pointed it out in the rulebook.

Balderdash is another fun game where someone reads a pretty obscure word, sentence or phrase on a card and everyone else writes down what they think it means. Then everyone votes on the one they think is correct. Well, we had a lot of fun with the game and lots of silly answers, so we created our own “Balderdash Hall of Fame”, keeping those answers and posting it on our refrigerator:

Last night, I was walking past the refrigerator and looking at the Hall of Fame as I sometimes do and reading the answers. One of the answer cards on there is from my daughter, two others are from our niece and the last one, the TFOA was written by Erika. That’s when it hit me and I had the realization. I was requiring these family game nights so I could create memories with my daughter. Family time that I could remember forever long after she’s grown up and moved away.

But what it also did was create fun and happy memories with Erika that I will remember forever.

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